During my second year of pastoral ministry, I attended a pastors’ conference. Of the many speakers, I now recall only one, and all I remember is his conclusion. At the time he was the pastor of one of the largest churches in the nation, a successful author and renowned speaker. As he approached the end of his long ministry, his message was a reflection on his experiences.
He listed some of the benefits he had enjoyed as a pastor. He described the free suits one of the members of his church had purchased for him and the free car provided for his use. He mentioned the beautiful house in which he lived at the church’s expense and the generous salary.
The list was long and impressive enough to make me, pastor of a small and struggling church, both envious and cynical.
We all have moments when we wonder if we have lost our sense of direction.
I grew increasingly uncomfortable as he continued, because I knew where all this was heading. “What if I had not been given all these benefits?” he was going to ask. “Would I still serve my Lord?”
I knew what the answer would be. He would say, “I have searched my heart, and by God’s grace, I would.”
It was a muggy summer evening, and my clothes were limp from the heat. The auditorium was crowded with more than a thousand pastors, and I was feeling out of place, overwhelmed by the parade of celebrity speakers. I was wishing I hadn’t come.
Things weren’t going well in my church, and I had come to the conference harboring a secret hope that I’d make some connections that would open the door to a different place of ministry. The last thing I wanted to hear about was his large salary, free suits, free car, and beautiful manse.
Sure enough, the question came. “What if I had never been given all these things?” the speaker boomed. “Would I still serve my Lord?” I slumped lower in my seat. There was a long, long pause.
“I don’t know. God help me,” he said. Then he left the platform.
I was shocked.
I was devastated.
I was convicted.
I avoided the ice cream social afterward and went to my room. There I fell on my knees and begged God for help, because I knew he had spoken the truth about me, too. I wondered how I would ever make it to the end of my own course of ministry. I had just begun, and already I felt like I was faltering. What hope was there for me later on? How could I find my way?
That was nearly two decades ago. My ministry context has changed. But I still find that I must revisit these questions in those moments we all have when we wonder if we have lost our sense of direction. Over the years I have found four compass points that help me to reorient myself.
One true calling
First and foremost is my sense of calling. I feel most confused when I am not sure that I am doing the right thing. Am I making the right choices? Am I investing myself in the most strategic areas of ministry? I am surrounded by people with diverse expectations, but what would God have me do? I need a sense of duty.
“What pastors do, or at least are called to do,” Eugene Peterson writes, “is really quite simple. We say the word of God accurately, so that congregations of Christians can stay in touch with the basic realities of their existence, so they know what is going on. And we say the Name personally, alongside our parishioners in the actual circumstances of their lives, so they will recognize and respond to the God who is both on our side and at our side when it doesn’t seem like it and when we don’t feel like it.”
These are the two primary and proper positions for the pastor: before God’s people, as one who proclaims God’s Word, and beside God’s people, as one who lives it out with them.
This does not simply mean focusing on the right things. It also includes a sense of being “in place.” It has a military dimension: we are “on duty” until we have been given liberty to leave.
After four years of serving that small church, I sent my resume to a church in the Detroit area. It was a larger congregation, had a nicer building and a church staff.
Best of all, it was almost within walking distance of the neighborhood where I grew up. My wife and I had both our families in the area. It seemed like an ideal situation.
But when I visited the church to candidate, a strange thing happened. I looked out over the congregation and saw familiar faces. Perhaps it was only my eyes playing tricks on me, but in the dim light of the sanctuary I swear I saw the faces of my little congregation in Green Valley. That experience confirmed what Jane and I already knew. As appealing as the church may have been, we had not been given the liberty to leave. I chose to remain at my post.
I had several other opportunities to change churches. Most of them seemed like “better” opportunities—larger congregations, more staff, nicer locale. Some were opportunities I had solicited.
In most cases the thing that kept me from accepting a call, even when I wanted to say “yes,” was the lack of a personal sense of release. Yes, this is subjective. But I did not feel that I could go until I sensed that the Holy Spirit had said, “You are dismissed.”
What God calls us to do may be simple, but that does not mean it is easy. The pastor’s most common companion is often a feeling of inadequacy. That is why a sense of duty must be accompanied by a second element …
A sense of self
Congregational expectations can be unreasonably high. They want a pastor as purpose driven as Rick Warren, as entrepreneurial as Bill Hybels, as evangelistic as Billy Graham, and as compassionate as Mother Teresa.
They want a wise leader: someone with easy answers to the complex problems of the church.
They want a charismatic leader: someone who can get the church to do what it doesn’t want to do and make them believe that they like it.
They want a dynamic leader: into whose hands they can place the broken shards of their lives and then receive them back again whole.
What do they get instead?
Someone like me. Not the wisest. Not the bravest. Not the holiest.
The best they can get is an ordinary person who has been given the privilege of participating in an extraordinary calling.
I met Samuel Watson Thornton when he was in his 80s. He literally walked into our church off the street. He had been looking for a place to worship that was closer to his home, and our little church had somehow attracted his attention.
Watson had grown up on the mission field in Japan, as the son of a pastor who was himself the son of a pastor. When the time came to decide on a career, he made the obvious choice. He decided to become a farmer!
One day, however, during a chapel service at the college he attended, he sensed that God wanted him to be a pastor.
“Lord,” Watson prayed, “I don’t want to be a pastor. I want to be a farmer.” But the Lord seemed to say, “Watson, I want you to be a pastor.”
When the chapel service ended and the rest of the students filed out, Watson remained in his seat, deep in prayer.
“Lord,” he complained, “I don’t want to be a pastor. I want to be a farmer.” Still, he felt the gentle urging of the Spirit, as the Lord insisted: “Watson, I want you to be a pastor.”
Finally, late in the evening, still sitting in the darkened chapel, Watson gave in: “Okay, Lord, have it your way. But I want you to know that you are losing a very good farmer and gaining a very poor pastor!”
Watson went on to have a ministry of building up several failing churches in Southern Illinois and later served as a missionary to Japan. During several of those years, he worked to support himself. As a farmer.
Watson became a mentor to me during my years at the church. I tried to visit him weekly and listen to his stories. I was impressed by his devotion to the Word.
Even at that late stage in his life, Watson was still an avid student of Scripture. He had determined to finish his life studying the Book of Revelation, and every time I visited him, he seemed to have gained some new insight.
He told me remarkable stories of God’s leading in his ministry, the kind you read about in missionary biographies. Yet he never lost the sense that he was just a farmer that God had reassigned.
Watson helped me see that having a healthy sense of self was a matter of being realistic about my ministry. It meant knowing where I was strong, where I was weak, and where I could get by. It meant building my ministry on my strengths, striving for competency in the areas where I just got by, and pleading for mercy in my areas of weakness. Left to myself, I, too, was “a very poor pastor,” no matter what my gifts might be.
Led by grace
John Newton wrote: “If you had the talents of an angel, you could do no good with them till His hour is come, and till He leads you to the people whom He has determined to bless by your means.”
If Newton is correct, much of what I think I could be doing for God, if I were just given the chance, could be wrong. The secret to success does not lie in who I am or who I know. In the end, the secret to ministry success is grace. That’s the third point on my ministry compass, awareness of God’s grace.
Eleven years ago, through an unusual combination of prayer and divinely arranged coincidence, the Lord made it clear that it was time for me to leave the church I had served for nine years and join the pastoral studies department of the Moody Bible Institute.
During my last month at the church, I attended a local ministerial meeting and was approached by a fellow pastor who had heard about the opportunity.
First, he offered his congratulations. Then, flushing a little with embarrassment, he said: “Don’t take this the wrong way. But I just have to ask—why you?”
I know what he meant. Had I been in his shoes, I would have asked the same question (though perhaps not aloud). In fact I often ask that of the Lord when I notice someone who seems to be doing something more glamorous or attractive than what I am now doing. I take a sidelong glance at their ministry, the way some men gaze in secret envy at another man’s wife, and think: Lord, why them and not me?
I am ashamed to admit it. This kind of envy takes the gift of ministry and turns it inside out. It twists the purpose of the church, so that its goal is to exalt me instead of Christ. It makes anyone who has better gifts, a more appealing opportunity, or greater outward success a potential threat rather than an ally.
So why them and not me? Or why me and not them? The answer is simple. It is a matter of grace. It is a result of God’s purpose and the ministry of the Holy Spirit, who alone has the sovereign right to dispense gifts and opportunities as he sees fit.
I am learning that I need to be careful about rushing to judgment about my potential for usefulness in any particular ministry. I don’t know where or how God plans to use me in the future. Neither should I be too quick to draw conclusions about the value of ministry that I have already accomplished.
I see only faces, not hearts. I may hear words of praise or criticism, but I cannot discern the still, small voice of conviction that burns within the hearts of those who hear what I preach or observe my life. I hope to know what God is doing through me. I often think I know what God wants to do. But I will not truly know, until the day of Christ reveals it.
This is why the final, and in some ways most important, point on the compass is a sense of expectation.
Great expectations
I must be realistic in my expectation of ministry and confident of the reward that will come afterward. Both are critical, because the call to ministry is a call to present suffering as well as eventual reward.
What was true of the master will be true of the servant. Jesus suffered and so will his disciples. If the flock suffers, simply because they follow Christ, how much more will that be true of those who shepherd the flock?
For pastors, it’s not the suffering that surprises us, so much as the source. Often it isn’t the world throwing stones but the flock. Many times as a pastor I wondered how the church could treat me this way and why God would expect me to put up with it.
Author Kathleen Norris wrestled with this question when she was trying to decide whether to join a church. She was helped in her decision by the blunt assessment of a Benedictine monk. “The church,” he said, “is still a sinful institution. How could it be otherwise?”
Norris writes that his words startled her into the “recognition of simple truth.”
“The church,” she explains, “is a human institution, full of ordinary people, sinners like me, who say and do stupid things.” The key phrase: sinners like me.
Why do we still bother with the church when it has caused us so much grief? The answer is simple. Because we have no other choice. Where else would we go? What else would we do? How can we give up now, when there is so much to be gained?
If life and ministry in the church doesn’t seem to be very glorious at times, it is because the glory comes later. My problem is that I want it now. And because I want it now, I am sometimes tempted to sell it short and settle for a lesser glory—for cheap praise or sex or money or perhaps just another half hour of sleep. We think the trouble is that we are disappointed with ministry, when the real problem, as C. S. Lewis once observed, is that we are ” … far too easily pleased.”
The apostle Paul, writing of his own ministry struggles, observed, “our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor. 4:17). The King James Version puts it more graphically, when it speaks of “a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”
Just what is this glory that is so luminous that it will cause all our troubles to pale in comparison? It is the gift of hearing Christ call us by name on the last day. It is the gift, not only of seeing Christ in glory, but of seeing that we are a reflection of that glory.
Most of all, it is the gift of finally seeing the glory and grace of Christ refracted back over the long and toilsome years of our ministry. Only then will it bring to light all the beauty, blessing, and reward that now is hidden from our sight.
John Koessler chairs the pastoral studies department at Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, Illinois.
Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
